Someone once told Stephanie Kramer that you can’t rush a pearl. “That, to me, is the definition of true luxury,” noted Kramer, director of marketing for Chanel, during a keynote speech at the recent Wharton Graduate Retail Conference.

But in a retail world that is increasingly about instant gratification, how do luxury brands like Chanel — which, in some sense, have built their mystique on being hard to obtain — find a niche? At Chanel, Kramer said, finding such a sweet spot has involved a measured approach that capitalizes on the brand’s iconic status, while also embracing the new ways consumers are interacting with it.

Citing statistics from eMarketer, Kramer noted that luxury brands are among the categories most affected by showrooming, the practice of visiting a physical store location to browse, but then actually buying an item online. “It’s important to try to make showrooming work for you,” she said. “Digital is our advocate and our ambassador, but it’s also our nemesis.”

Although many brands seeking to craft a marketing strategy that encompasses multiple retail channels have turned to the “spaghetti model” of “throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks,” it usually doesn’t work, Kramer pointed out. And luxury brands have to strike a balance, she added, because their customers see them — and by association, themselves — as trendsetters, not followers. “The concept of showrooming, or learning more, has to add value to the experience in luxury, versus [simply] price-checking” at stores with broader audiences, she noted.

The most effective digital strategies for luxury goods are those that enhance a brand without taking away from its aspirational image, Kramer said. Among the brands she feels are “getting it right” is Burberry, which, for example, has fully integrated its Regent Street London store with technology from the company’s website — including “magic mirrors” that transform into television screens allowing customers to see how the garments they are trying on looked on the runway.

“Burberry tweeted backstage photos of models before they went out on the runway. They live-streamed the fashion show on Facebook in high definition,” Kramer noted. “It’s a unique example of a brand that took the tools that are available, made them their own and used them in a way that a customer of that particular brand will appreciate.”

While Kramer was preparing for her Wharton presentation, literally every day she found news of a new fashion-related application or website — from a feature on the eBay Fashion app that allows customers to take a picture of a particular fabric or image that inspires them and search for garments with the same color distribution, to Kaleidoscope, an application that allows users to search fashion images from the street to the web and directs them to where they can buy those pieces.

Chanel has used its website to feature unseen footage of Marilyn Monroe and a history of its Chanel No. 5 perfume. But online, customers can only buy the brand’s makeup and skincare lines — they must still hit the stores to browse or buy clothing, handbags and jewelry, which is in keeping with the company’s customer profile, Kramer noted.

“Beauty has always sold in a lot of different areas, as opposed to boutiques in fashion and specifically luxury brands,” she said. “Luxury is something where we like to have a baseline of access; we don’t think people expect to be able to purchase the fashion collection or handbags online. They know that is limited. We’ve talked a lot about selling watches online, which would be the next tier. Some players are doing a great job of that, but … we’re a price point above that.”

Technology has altered consumer product marketing from a top-down, somewhat paternalistic enterprise to an immediate experience that has more in common with a door-to-door salesman. Within the last decade, hordes of middlemen or third-party distributors have been obliterated from corporate flow charts. Instead, major manufacturers are hearing their products praised and castigated directly from consumers. And many of those consumers have a potentially powerful and infinite network of “friends.”

Measuring and managing that constant flow of feedback is the greatest challenge facing modern marketing managers, according to Peter Fader, a Wharton marketing professor and co-director of the school’s Customer Analytics Initiative. Fader moderated a panel discussion on the topic at the recent Wharton Marketing Conference.

Within the 90-minute discussion, six experts from leading consumer products companies described technology in general and social media in particular in a variety of ways, ranging from gift to burden. They toyed with words like “enabler,” “channel, partner,” “buzz meter,” “tsunami of data” and “problem generator.” One panelist hailed digital technology as a teaching moment because companies that monitor the web may uncover misinformation about their products and respond.

“There’s way more data now, and it’s a lot more work. Those days of meeting once a year to launch a single marketing campaign are over,” said Ryu Yokoi, senior brand manager for Unilever, a multinational company with headquarters in Rotterdam and London. “On the other hand, the feedback is very tangible and a lot more fun.”

A self-described “pop culture junkie,” Yokoi begins his day scanning the digital landscape for innovative promotions from Amazon to Living Social, and for online chatter about Lipton Tea, his major responsibility for the company. Other Unilever brands include Hellmann’s, Dove, Breyers, Ben & Jerry’s, Skippy and Vaseline. “The one place I don’t want to see our name is the “Condescending Corporate Brand” page on Facebook, [which] rips companies for posting what they consider dumb and insulting content on their Facebook pages.”

Frequently characterized as the word-of-mouth platform, Facebook is a critical tool, but not the only tool for getting out a marketing message on social media, noted Janis Fratamico, director of client experience for IBM Global Client Centers. “The truth is a lot of these Facebook pages have no value. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the quantity and we recognize that we are not effectively using all the social media that is out there already.”

According to Amy Saunders, director of Johnson & Johnson’s digital center of excellence, the New Brunswick, N.J.-based company uses everything from old-style marketing, such as putting promotions on hospital maternity ward TV networks, to new media-influenced strategies, like analyzing skin problems based emailed photos from consumers.

As online buying continues to grow, so does showrooming, a trend in which consumers shop around at retail stores to examine products and pick the brains of sales clerks before actually buying from an online source offering cheaper prices. “It is a concern because we don’t want to be competition for our retailers,” noted Saunders, who has crafted multi-channel marketing strategies for J&J brands including Neutrogena, Aveeno, Listerine, Visine and Zyrtec.

Her concerns were echoed by Jeremiah Marble, a product manager for Microsoft. ”People want to touch a new phone and experience it in a tangible way,” he said. “Striking that balance between virtual and real customer contact is a challenge.”

Jeff Bedard, marketing director for Chase Sapphire, shared an anecdote that revealed the potential hazards for marketers from an annoyed customer with time to burn and a smartphone in his or her hand. Chase Sapphire is the credit card division of New York-based JPMorgan Chase.

A customer, he recalled, was annoyed with the long line ahead of her at a Chase bank branch. She grabbed her phone and began trashing the bank’s service in a tweet. A Chase social media monitor responded immediately to the tweet and asked if he could help her transact her business online instead of waiting for a teller.

While Chase Sapphire strives to be cutting edge in a competitive business, Bedard calls new technology “a gift to marketers,” but inevitably problematic. “The challenge is to uncover those problems and solve them before they get out of hand,” he said.

Technology can introduce moral dilemmas as well, noted Avi Mannis, vice president of marketing for Hawaiian Airlines. To illustrate, he proposed a common scenario in his business: lost luggage. “Do we go out of our way to help the customer with thousands of Twitter followers or the person who has none?” he asked. “Sometimes, technology can be a burden.”

Anyone who has ever sat through a commencement address, read a self-help book or sought input from a friend when making a tough decision has probably heard this seemingly straightforward piece of advice: “Do what makes you happy.”

But the connection between doing what’s best for you and being content with that decision is more tenuous than most of us might think. According to Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small and PhD student Jonathan Berman, the conflict inherent in making a decision — and guilt about choosing oneself over the chance to help others — often makes looking out for your own self-interest seem downright miserable.

“Context is critical — people make very different choices based on the background. When the context is right, self-interest can feel quite pleasurable,” Small says, noting that people make numerous choices every day without thinking of them in moral terms. “But when self-interest is directly pitted against the needs of others, it makes self-interest feel selfish.”

Some people are psychologically hard-wired to think everything they do is selfish, Berman points out, while “others are oriented to think that nothing they do in their own self-interest is selfish.” Berman and Small decided to see what happened when the choice was taken out of people’s hands. In a recent paper, “Self-Interest without Selfishness: The Hedonic Benefit of Imposed Self-Interest,” which is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, they show that people who had a self-interested outcome imposed on them were able to enjoy it without the burden of feeling “selfish” — and were happier on average than those who got to make the choice on their own.

In the first of three experiments, 216 people were told that they were either going to be given $3 to spend on themselves, or would donate that money to UNICEF. Some participants got to choose between the two options; the others had no choice — they were forced forced to either keep the money or give it to charity.

After the first study, participants were asked was asked to rate on a scale of one to seven how much enjoyment they got from the experience. The happiest group of people by a significant margin were those who were simply told they could keep the money, rather than being told to donate it to charity or to decide between the two options. (Credit: Deborah Small and Jonathan Berman)

Afterward, the entire group was asked to rate on a scale of one to seven how much enjoyment they got from the experience. The happiest group of people by a significant margin, the researchers found, were those who were simply told they could keep the money.

“The idea is to make it feel less and less like a choice,” Berman says. “The less something feels like a choice, the less tension people feel and the better they feel as a result.”

In the next experiment, 132 people were asked either to choose between accepting one of two gift cards, to pick one of two charities to give a $5 donation to or to decide whether to take a gift card or give the equivalent amount to charity. Once again, those who were only presented with gift cards(self-interested options) proved to be the happiest with the outcome.

Finally, Berman and Small conducted a third experiment designed to study whether people’s perceived level of control over a decision impacted their level of happiness with that choice. They recruited 252 people through Amazon Mechanical Turk and told the group that each would receive a monetary bonus in exchange for their work or would be asked to donate the same amount to UNICEF.

Participants were asked to give their preference between the two options and then told that either they would get to make the choice, or the computer would make it for them. (Unbeknownst to the group, however, the computer “picked” whatever option the participant said he or she wanted.) Once again, the group was asked how happy they were — and once again, those who got to keep the money were happier when they believed the decision was imposed on them.

According to Small and Berman, the research shows the danger inherent in giving people too many choices, and how giving moral undertones to a particular decision could put at risk the happiness that consumers associate with a particular store or product.

As an example, Berman points to programs in which supermarkets give customers a choice at checkout of whether to keep a refund for bringing their own reusable grocery bags, or to give that money to charity instead. “Companies tend to think about the people who would want that option, not about the people who don’t want to take it,” he notes. “Maybe if they just gave everyone the money as a refund, everyone would feel better off.”

“Or they could impose the choice to donate to charity,” Small adds. “Lots of companies do. For example, they say that for every dollar you spend, a portion of that is given to charity. Cause marketing is very effective if it is done well. Consumers like the idea of doing good. But the potential downside is that putting the customer in the position of deciding whether or not to do good might make him or her feel less satisfied.”

However, Berman notes, that feeling selfish isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “In some sense, the feeling of selfishness is a good thing for morality because people who don’t want to feel selfish end up doing good deeds,” Berman says. “Maybe there is a trade-off between your own happiness and doing good deeds, but it’s also doing good for the world.”